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THE MYTH OF THE CLEARANCES Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of the structure of myth (1993: 206-231; 1966: 245-269; Leach 1996: 67-99; Tilley 1990: 35-48) may also shed some light on the process of homogenisation through which variant accounts of the Clearance experience become subsumed into a dominant narrative. Lévi-Strauss argues that history serves a similar purpose in the modern West as myth in ‘traditional’ societies. History, like myth, is a synthesising—and simplifying—narrative, it is a story told in which “information” and “comprehension” compete for precedence (1966: 261). “Truly total history” amounts to incomprehensible chaos, for “where did anything take place,” asks Lévi-Strauss (1966: 257), but in the mutable perceptions of a multitude of individuals? Historical narrative comes to dominate this confusion of contradictory experience, structuring it according to the logic of the mind. For Lévi-Strauss, this structure is comprised of strings of binary oppositions or before and after propositions. Such propositions (mythemes), whilst apparently diverse, are found to be remarkably consistent and can be assembled into a metanarrative or “prototype myth” which incorporates all alternative tellings. In myth, no telling is considered to be the “original” or more authentic one,
	There is no single “true” version of which all the others are but copies or distortions. Every version belongs to the myth (1993: 218).
It is important to note, therefore, that, as variants of the Clearance metanarrative, the academic’s and the popular historian’s accounts are given equal validity, as indeed are all tellings, whether oral, documentary or material. Because they share this common structure, history, myth and memory are no longer to be seen as separate, competing versions of the past—history as the objective account, myth as a dubious fable, and memory its fallible recollection—but as interactive elements, inextricably bound to each other and to the narrative itself. “All recollections,” Samuel and Thompson write,
	are told from a standpoint in the present. In telling, they need to make sense of the past. That demands a selecting, ordering, and simplifying, a construction of coherent narrative whose logic works to draw the life story towards the fable (1990: 8).
This emplotment of fragmentary experience into a ‘sensible’ whole relies on conscious and unconscious acts of displacement, omission and reinterpretation (5), but the process can be so subtle that, as Lowenthal warns, the coherence of the narrative can be misread as an attribute of the past itself (1995: 219). Lévi-Strauss finds an “astounding similarity” between the myths he collected in “widely different regions” (1993: 208); indeed, in his voluminous Mythologiques, he assembles over 800 myths from throughout the Americas into a single ‘myth system’. There is a similar tendency to situate the metanarrative of the Sutherland Clearances within the meta-metanarrative of the Highland Clearances within the meta-meta-metanarrative—the archetypal narrative?—of all eviction, emigration and exile. Pursuing Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist logic a little further, the following are examples of constituent “mythemes” of such narratives: binary oppositions conceived as a positive past and a negative future pivoting on the date of eviction and expressed as profound loss:
loss of home and homeland loss of distinct language and culture passing of ‘golden age’ severing of hitherto unbreached continuity with ancestors loss of control of own destiny
or as the contrast between evicted and evictor:
“Ancient respectable tenants” - “Strangers with capital”* insider - outsider moral - immoral ‘cultured’ - ‘uncultured’ traditional - modern subsistence economy - capitalist economy * (Macleod 1996: 52)
These propositions may be exemplified in each ‘layer’ of the eviction narrative, and, indeed, every story of the Clearances is, in some way, a particular expression of such general themes. ‘MEMORY-BOOKS’ This is certainly true of the content of what may be called the ‘memory books’ of the Highland Clearances: the ‘evidence’ compiled for the ‘Napier Commission’ of 1884. This Parliamentary commission into the “Condition of the Crofters and Cottars of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland” gave a unique opportunity for “ordinary people to speak directly into the historical record,” it “provides the authentic voice of the Highlands, silent for most of the decades of the clearances” (Richards 1985: 85-6). Gibson described to me how, in the 1880’s, the activities of the Commission created a “climate of remembrance” in the Highlands which tended to fix in people’s minds what had happened to them (pers. comm.). Richards describes it as a period of “collective nostalgia,” witnessing a revival of the memory of the Clearances when they had all but become “a thing of the past” (1985: 76). As Richards notes, from an historian’s point of view (at least one trying to assemble an ‘objective’ account), there are many problems in the interpretation of such data: the witnesses, for example, “almost always recounted events several decades in the past” (86). The question regarding the reliability of these testimonies has provoked its own controversies (Mitchison 1981: 14-15; Grimble 1983: 46-7), but this is largely irrelevant when one is concerned with the subjective perception of the events recalled. Williams has written in the context of the English enclosures that the “structure of feeling” expressed in such folk testimonials “is not primarily a matter of historical explanation and analysis” but is, rather, symptomatic of even more significant social phenomena (1993: 35). And as Anderson (1983) has amply demonstrated, such ‘imagined’ entities are nevertheless realities, often having unequivocally real consequences. This is a point I believe Withers fails to make when he begins a recent article on the memorialisation of the Clearances, “This paper is not concerned with the reality of past events in time and space but with the memory of them” (1996: 325). It is the memory of past events that creates their reality. I include two well-known ‘constitutive stories’ of the Sutherland Clearance ‘myth’, one of which exemplifies the passing of a golden age mytheme, the other, the relative morality of evictor and evicted. (1) Professor Donald Mackinnon taking evidence for the Napier Commission from eighty-year-old crofter Angus Mackay, Farr Church, 1883. (It is not known whether Mackinnon spoke to Mackay in Gaelic and then translated the conversation into English for the record or whether a translator was present.)
	‘Where were you brought up yourself?’ ‘In Strathnaver.’ ‘When did you leave Strathnaver?’ ‘I left when young and came to Strathy Point when the sheep commenced.’ ‘Do you remember the time?’ ‘Yes, I was very nearly drowned that day.’ ‘Is that what makes you remember it?’ ‘Yes. I will remember it as long as I live. I got a terrible fright.’ … ‘Were you old enough to remember the circumstances of the people at the time?’ ‘It would be a very hard heart but would mourn to see the circumstances of the people that day. He would be a very cruel man who would not mourn for the people.’ ‘What condition were they in before they left?’ ‘If you were going up the strath now you would see on both sides of it the places where the towns were—you would see a mile or half a mile between every town; there were four or five families in each of these towns, and bonnie haughs between the towns, and hill pastures for miles, as far as they could wish to go. The people had plenty of flocks of goats, sheep, horses, and cattle, and they were living happy.’ ‘Do you remember yourself quite well that these people were comfortably off at the time?’ ‘Remarkably comfortable—that is what they were—with flesh and fish and butter and cheese and fowl and potatoes, and kail and milk, too. There was no want of anything with them; and they had the Gospel preached to them at both ends of the strath. I remember of Mr. McGillivray being there as a preacher. But what I have seen since then! There was a beggar like myself, a woman living in Strathnaver, and she went round the shepherds; and when she came back there was one Gordon in this low country asked her, had she news from Strathnaver. “I shall tell you my news from Strathnaver.” “What is it?” “The wood has been taken off the crofters’ houses and it was sent to Alltnaharra for a house of revelry and drunkenness. The manse which the godly ministers of old occupied is now occupied by a fox hunter, and his study is the dog kennel. The house which yourself had, and the great big stone at which you were wont to pray, the crow now builds its nest upon the top of it”’ (quoted in Grimble 1993: 119-20).
This recollection of a golden age of plenty prior to the Clearances stands in stark contrast to an alternative account of Sutherland at about the same time:
	Every family has a small farm which they are too poor to stock with sheep or cattle, and in a bad year, as the last, when all the Oats were spoilt with the rain, they were reduced to absolute starvation. I have seen misery in Wales, but till I came into the Country, I had no idea of human or indeed any other Creature existing in such habitations as I have seen, and their food, if possible, still worse (Grenville quoted in Richards 1982: 95).
Note also Mackay’s portrayal of the blaspheming incomers with their sheep and sheepdogs, employing an imagery familiar to students of the literature of the agrarian disruptions of Tudor England:
	The townes goe downe, the land decayes Of cornefeldes playne leyes, Gret men makithe now a dayes A shepecote in the Church. (The ballad of Nowadays quoted in Beresford 1983: 65) …in my time there was not a House left inhabited of this whole lordship (except some part of the Hall) but a Shepherd only kept ale to sell in the Church. (Description of Thorpe, Leics cleared in 1491, quoted in Beresford 1983: 92)
(2) Donald Macleod’s ‘eye-witness’ account of Patrick Sellar’s burning of William Chisholm’s house at Badinloskin in 1814. Macleod’s account was first published in a letter to the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle in 1840. It was later re-printed in his Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland.
	I was present at the pulling down and burning of the house of William Chisholm, Badinloskin, in which was lying his wife’s mother, an old bed-ridden woman of near 100 years of age, none of the family being present. I informed the persons about to set fire to the house of this circumstance, and prevailed on them to wait till Mr. Sellar came. On his arrival I told him of the poor old woman being in a condition unfit for removal. He replied, “Damn her, the old witch, she has lived too long; let her burn.” Fire was immediately set to the house, and the blankets in which she was carried were in flames before she could be got out. She was placed in a little shed, and it was with great difficulty they were prevented from firing it also. The old woman’s daughter arrived while the house was on fire, and assisted the neighbours in removing her mother out of the flames and smoke, presenting a picture of horror which I shall never forget, but cannot attempt to describe. She died within five days (Macleod 1996: 42-3).
Sellar was later tried, and acquitted, for culpable homicide. He is perhaps the most notorious character of the whole Clearance story. Indeed the folk memory of Sellar is probably the strongest surviving element of Clearance oral tradition. More than one of my informants remembered hearing his name being used as a curse in their childhood:
	“there’d be some individual saying, ‘oh he’s a real Patrick Sellar, he cleared his father out of a croft or something…’ You know, as a term of contempt.”
Representation of the Clearances at Timespan Visitor Centre, Helmsdale (from a postcard)
In The Trial of Patrick Sellar, Grimble quotes a poem by Domhnall Baillidh which he believes to have been written soon after Sellar’s acquittal. It surfaced in an 1889 collection of Gaelic poetry in Prince Edward Island, Canada. It laments that Sellar was not sentenced to a long imprisonment on bread and water, elaborates on severer punishments which would be appropriate, and forecasts that when he dies he will not receive decent burial but be flung on a dung-heap (1993: 161). Hamish Henderson has produced a Scots translation of another nineteenth century song which captures some of the force of the original Gaelic:
	Sellar, daith has ye in his grip; Ye needa think he’ll let ye slip. Justice ye’ve earned, and, by the Book, A warm assize ye winna jouk. The fires ye lit tae gut Strathnaver Ye’ll feel them noo—and roast forever. (quoted in MacInnes 1964: 106)
I have already mentioned Sellar’s “Damn her, the old witch…”; it is significant that this phrase is prominently included in a tape recording accompanying the ‘wax-work’ representation of the Clearances at the ‘Timespan Visitor Centre’ in Helmsdale, one of Sutherland’s more popular ‘built’ tourist attractions and self-proclaimed “Storehouse of Highland History” (advertising leaflet). Donald Macleod is himself something of a folk hero: a memorial was erected in his honour in 1981, it stands on the banks of the Naver opposite the deserted village of Rosal where he was born. A “natural crusading journalist,” Macleod was devoted to “expostulating, remonstrating with, and exposing the desolators of [his] country” (Strathnaver Museum factsheet). He has appeared as a character in two of the best-known novels written about the Clearances, in Iain Crichton Smith’s Consider the Lillies (1968) with his own name, and in Neil Gunn’s Butcher’s Broom (1934) as the character Hector Sutherland.
In memory of Donald Macleod, stonemason...
An excerpt from Gunn’s ‘fictionalisation’ of Macleod’s account provides a fascinating demonstration of the re-working of the myth. Note how the 1840’s “witch” has become a 1930’s “bitch.” Chisholm is represented as Seumas og, Sellar as Mr Heller:
	There was no appearance of Seumas og anywhere. The roof was being demolished and a man with a torch was about to set fire to it. Hector went up to him. ‘There’s an old bed-ridden woman in there,’ he said inoffensively. ‘Who told you?’ asked the man, with a jeering threat. ‘I’m telling you,’ said Hector quietly. ‘I’ll take her out.’ ‘Who the hell are you?’ he shouted, and a man came up whom Hector believed to be Mr Heller, though he had never actually seen him in the flesh before. ‘What do you want?’ demanded this man in English. Hector had no English and replied in Gaelic. ‘He’s saying there’s an old bed-ridden hag inside,’ explained the man with the torch. ‘Oh, is he?’ A venomous intensity gathered in the factor’s expression. Hector was not an evasive specimen of the native; on the contrary, his large frame and clear-cut features gathered a certain aristocratic antagonism. ‘Get out of here,’ said Mr Heller; ‘you lazy devil, clear out!’ Hector gave a pace or two before this explosive violence. ‘What about the old woman?’ cried the man with the torch, his eyes gleaming. ‘Damn her, the old bitch, she’s lived long enough. Let her burn!’ cried Mr Heller. The men, half-mad with drink and the growing lust of destruction, gave a laugh. No half-way measure with their factor! Burn the bitch! … Factor Heller was a wise man. This work had to be done: it would, by God, be done thoroughly! That Gael should curse Gael, that this breed should destroy itself, was necessary for the new order of Progress. Clear them out! Rid the land of such human vermin! For himself and his schemes, he had imported, and would continue to import, thank God, real human beings from the south! (Gunn 1991: 357-59).
The deconstruction of any such story would make a fascinating study in itself. In the present context, however, it is interesting to note how Gunn incorporates the rhetoric of 1930’s Fascism in his representation of the past. Indeed, nearly 100 years earlier, Macleod himself had been vociferous on this racist theme: “If the original inhabitants could have been got rid of totally, and their language and memory eradicated, the oppressors were not disposed to be scrupulous about the means” (1996: 58). It is not surprising that such a rhetoric continues into the present day to further political ends. For example, ex-SNP Councillor Sandy Lindsay has referred to the 1st Duke of Sutherland as,
	perhaps one of the most evil men there ever was. Like Stalin and Hitler, he destroyed people’s homes without cause (quoted in Gibson 1996b: 14).
Others too have referred to a Gaelic or Highland Holocaust (see Gibson 1996b: 6, 12, 39), have alikened the evictions to “the shipping-off of the Polish and other Jews in cattle trucks” (Craig 1990: 72), and have accused their perpetrators of committing genocide (Ewing quoted in Gibson 1996b: 41). Such hyperbole hides a more profound kinship of the Highland experience with that of the Jewish and other diasporas, in fact with all people who for one reason or another sense the loss of a homeland. It is a “bitter inheritance” Hunter writes, “a sense of belonging to a wronged people” (1995: 25-6). Within this assertion is an implicit demand that the crimes of the past should not be forgotten, that a moral debt exists that remains unpaid. Gibson describes “a legacy of deep injustice which remains unresolved to this day (1996b: 3), “a deep wrong as yet unrighted” (Preface). Discussing the mentality of ‘monumentality’, Gass suggests that “it is sometimes vitally necessary to focus the thoughts of a group upon some past person or event, to get people to remember together, perhaps because we have a new and common enterprise in mind which demands we act together [Scottish devolution, for example], but often simply because the unity of the group is thereby affirmed” (1982: 130). For any ‘dispersed nation’, the sense of a shared past is, of course, doubly important.
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